How we got here.
by writer/director Paul Fitzgerald
In 2003 I wrote the script for Forgiven. I was motivated to do so because then, as now, there were stories breaking all over the country, on what seemed like a weekly basis, about wrongly convicted persons being found innocent of crimes for which they had been previously found guilty. As I began to delve into research about this issue, one thing caught my attention: almost without fail, in each case, there was no formal apology from any agency of government that was involved in these extreme and tragic miscarriages of justice. And so I set out to write a story about apology. And forgiveness. And what those two things mean, if anything, in the relationship between individuals and their organizing civic structures.
The movie was shot in the fall of 2004 in Wilmington, NC, in eighteen days on Super 16, with an amazing cast and crew, funded by money raised through friends and family. In 2005 we stopped and started with post production until the movie was complete. I nearly had a nervous breakdown that year, thinking I’d brought disaster, ruin and infamy upon myself for having tried to make a film that I thought often times along the way — sucked.
And then the day after Thanksgiving in 2005 we learned we’d been accepted into the Sundance Film Festival and had, moreover, been nominated for the Grand Jury Prize. Sundance was Sundance. The movie did not sell. The star rose, the sky fell, etc. And we carried on, taking the movie to festivals throughout the US and Europe, into 2007. And then silence enveloped us. And my producer and I sat there with a film that, though certainly some people didn’t get, had also somehow managed to bring some people to tears. Audience members greeting me after screenings, saying the film had changed their life. Emails from strangers saying they would never think about the death penalty or race or the American justice system the same way again.
I mostly drank for a while after that. And decided filmmaking was an idiot’s calling. Or at least the making of the kind of films I seem to want to make. Or maybe I just thought I was an idiot.
And then the world changed. Thomas Friedman proclaimed it flat. Apparently the interweb was here to say. And in the upshot, for independent filmmakers, the audience became not so much limited to those located near a theatre near you…but basically everyone on the planet who had access to the web.
And so we got our act together. And here we are. I hope you watch the film. I set out with the ridiculous premise of hoping to change the world with this movie. In the end, I came to realize I’d just made a movie. Still…
